


Salt

by SilverDagger



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: F/F, Ficlet, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-21 05:08:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4816181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A quiet moment by the cistern beneath the Citadel, a chance to grieve and begin anew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salt

The first thing the Dag does, once her time is her own, is go down to where the water is kept.

She's never been that way before - never been anywhere in this old pile of rock that wasn't a prison - and it takes a War Boy to point her in the right direction. He gives her a scarred grin, offers to show her there himself. Kindness in him, though she knows he's killed before, out in the desert where everything runs salt-dry and fever-hot. And he's dying, but so's everyone else. He's just going to get there a little faster.

She says she wants to go alone, and he lets her. She thinks he watches her, but he lets her go and she doesn't look back, and maybe he doesn't watch after all. She follows the tunnel down and down, past dead machines and useless weapons, until she reaches the underground cistern. No light but her lantern, no noise but the sound of her bare feet on cool stone, a vastness that she can only tell by echoes. She sits beside the water, still and dark as a sky empty of stars, and she clutches the satchel of seeds and thinks about nothing at all. She doesn't cry for the woman who carried them so far, killed and died for them and for her. The Dag left her tears behind in the wasteland, but some seeds need tears to water them, and she wishes she could.

It's hard to say how long she stays there, alone with the silence, but it helps. Then she hears the groan of a door swinging open, and she's not alone anymore.

It's Toast. She came down without a lantern; the only light is the Dag's, and Toast is only a silhouette against the door until she steps into its range. But the Dag could recognize her in less light than this, the way she walks like anything in front of her had better step aside - always liked that about her, even when it's a bluff. She sits and bends to skim her fingers over the water's surface, reverent.

"Would you look at that," she whispers, and her voice echoes in the empty space of the cavern and comes back stranger, more resonant. The Dag has never heard Toast sound so soft before, except when she was trying to lie, and even then she could never make it convincing. Too much heat in her, too much unvented poison, like coal fires burning underground. But there's no fire here, only water and cool, humid air, and if there's poison, it's buried deep.

"It's a pretty thing, isn't it, all that water?" Toast says. The Dag doesn't care about _pretty_ and doubts Toast does either, but if there's a better word for whatever she's seeing in those depths, the Dag doesn't know it either.

"It's ours now," she continues. "That why you came down here? To look at what belongs to us?"

"I'm here because I wanted to be alone."

"Then I'll get gone," Toast says, starting to stand. The Dag catches her wrist unthinking, and for a moment it seems like she might strike out, automatic - not at the Dag, but at anyone who lays a hand on her with no warning, and it's nothing to blame her for if she did. The Dag would have done the same, probably. But then the impulse seems to fade, and Toast stands looking down like she's forgotten what she meant to do.

"You could do that," the Dag hears herself say. "Or not. Your choice."

Toast sits again, not gracefully but like her legs won't hold her weight, draws her knees up to her chest and stares across the water like the Dag was doing, when she wanted to leave herself behind. Funny how Toast's presence draws that emptiness out of her, even as Toast seems to take it on herself. Maybe there's a sort of balance there, give and take, or maybe the Dag's full of shit and just as crazy as they always called her. Might be both. But the Dag didn't tell Toast to stay so that she could recede into herself, and she rests her hand over Toast's and clasps it tight, running her thumb over the small scars she bears from the life she had before she came here.

Toast's skin is warm, even in the cool of the underground, and she tenses, breath arrested, eyes dark as a War Boy skeleton mask. The Dag knows how to recognize desire when she sees it. Wouldn't have survived long if she couldn't, but it's different now, when she doesn't hate the thought of it. She wouldn't mind, she thinks, learning what Toast's hair smells like now, free of dust and stinking perfumes, or finding out what it would taste like to kiss her. Like nothing much, she suspects, the way water tastes like nothing much, and is still the sweetest thing in this dry-bone world.

"You're wrong, you know," she says.

Toast looks at her, calm and cagey, says, "what do you mean by that?"

"Can't own water. Everything else, maybe, but not that." Like trying to own a life - you might think you do, but it always gets away from you in the end.

"Maybe so," Toast says, not really arguing. The Dag thinks she wants to believe it, and a few other things besides - but it doesn't matter, in the end, what either of them believe. They're here, alone, together, with water and time enough to make a life on the margins of survival. And when the Dag lifts a hand to the arch of Toast's cheekbone, following the tracks that tears have made, Toast doesn't pull away. She tilts her head into the touch with a sigh, lets the Dag stroke her hair like someone might have done for her once, too long ago to remember.

Not all seeds need tears to water them. The Dag thinks of water and salt and sand, the taste of nothing much, and tells herself it's worth remembering that.


End file.
